23. Mal #2
The faint shudder in his shoulders and the too-fast rise and fall of his beautiful inked chest.
Not a fight, but a fucking war.
“Sky.” I hold my hands up, surrendering to whatever he needs from me right now, whispering the name I can’t tell if he hates or loves.
He doesn’t react.
I take a chance and move closer, invading his space, his everything as I lower my hands to slide them over his hips, fingers skimming the skin exposed by his low-slung waistband.
His whole frame shudders and it’s not my magic touch. It’s the tension I’ve felt in him before, but a thousand times worse. Like he’s strung so tight, if he snaps, he’ll never be the same when it’s over.
“ Sky .”
Another whisper.
And still nothing, as if he’s barricaded himself from the inside, every muscle and nerve braced against something I can’t see. That he doesn’t want me to see, but he’s so fucking tired of hiding he can’t find the will to push me away.
I’m good with danger.
Bad at caution.
But I try to be careful as I let one hand ascend his spine to the base of his skull and wrap my other arm tight around him, guiding him with wordless affection until he’s flush against me and fucking him doesn’t cross my mind.
I cage him in an embrace he didn’t ask for. He lets me for long enough that I find the balls to tangle my fingers in his hair and rub his neck, kneading the taut muscles and tendons as I coax him to rest his head on my shoulder.
Skylar . I don’t say his name again, but it reverberates in the echo chamber my heart has been since my mam was killed doing the exact same stupid shit Jack pulled twenty-five years later.
Because their hearts were too big— too full .
Mine’s just fucking faulty, but holding Skylar pours oil on the corroded valves and I breathe easier as some of the fight leaves him.
I press my face into his neck and kiss him there, soft and static, not leading.
I rub my scratchy cheek to his and beg him with every silent voice I have not to shove me off.
For long moments he doesn’t.
Then he tilts his head and we’re kissing before I have the brain power to stop it, and it’s like the kisses we shared in the water at the lagoon.
When I was naked and he didn’t seem to notice.
And maybe that’s what’s happening here, except it’s not literal.
It’s that Skylar’s flayed wide open and he can’t let me see, because he doesn’t know how.
Sol’s words come back to me.
You’re a hate fuck waiting to happen.
Maybe it already has and this shit…it needs to stop . But the current thrumming between me and Skylar, it’s a wicked thing. His lips taste sweet, and his cool fingers slipping under my threadbare t-shirt are even sweeter.
I stagger a little, holding him tighter for balance. Hit the wall behind me anyway, and after weeks of pinning him with my taller frame, the sensation of his hard muscle pushing against me spins my head.
He’s not a cornered animal anymore.
He’s cornering me .
And fool that I am, I’m letting him.
But his mouth on mine, his hot breath stealing the literal air from my fucking lungs, it’s so good I lose what little cognitive function I ever had around him in the first place.
I lose the ability to separate the primal attraction I know is real for both of us and the masterclass in derailment he’s treating me to.
My blood rushes south, and I know I could come like this—from the friction we’re tearing from each other in the hallway while Sol and Jack work downstairs. From the thrill of letting Skylar manoeuvre me into his room.
It’s dark and airless.
Blinds closed. Window shut.
Skylar shoves me against the door and I wonder if he wants to fuck me this time. Get dizzy at the notion. It’s been years since I’ve wanted that. Too many to count. But Skylar—fuck. I want him in any capacity he’s willing to give, and I’m pretty sure he fucking knows it.
He bites my lips, going for the loose button on my shorts.
I don’t fight it.
I tip my head back, swallowing a moan as he grips me in his fist, my own hands grasping at him, wrenching his shirt up his lean body.
He lets me go to lose it.
It leaves him in the low-slung sweats he wears to work sometimes, blue scrubs stuffed in his bag, and I’m as much a goner for his inked torso as I was the first time.
The second.
The third.
I tug him against me, pushing at those illegal fucking sweats, my pulse a drum line of want and need, even as my brain tries to haul me back. I kiss him , and the bitten-off sound he makes flushes all rational thought clean out of my skull.
We wind up on the floor. Skylar pushes me down with force and I let him shove me back against the door and pin me— straddle me—his dick pressing into my stomach.
I bring my knees up, hands gripping the back of his neck, feeling the raw need thrumming beneath his skin as he stares me down, rolling his hips with purpose.
“Do they test you in the SAS?”
Test me? It takes far too many seconds for me to compute what he means. Then I shake my head. “Not unless we ask for it. But I’ve never had unprotected sex in my fucking life.”
“You want it?”
“What?”
Skylar rolls his hips again, slow and ruthless. “I got tested last month, and I said , do you want it?”
It.
Him.
Bare .
My blood thrums with fresh heat, every nerve flaring with new life. “I’m good with it if you are.”
Skylar says nothing. He waits, giving me the chance to change my mind. But it’s not going to happen. I’m so bewitched by him he could do anything to me right now.
And he fucking knows it.
I know he does.
We don’t speak again. Skylar lubes my cock and bears down on me, crowding me against the door at my back in the murky light of his room. Hands on my chest, holding me still, as if I’d dare fucking move.
He takes what he wants, what he needs, and the sensation of sliding inside him with no barrier is as wild as I’ve imagined it to be.
And I have imagined it, every fucking day since I met him?—
Skylar grips my chin, tipping my head back.
He grinds down on me and my body reacts with sweat and sound.
So much sound. He presses his hand over my mouth, his gaze so dark it’s hard to know if he’s really in there, but as the controlled rhythm he started with amps up into something else, I’m not sure I’m truly here either.
I know what he’s doing.
I know .
He’s drawing me from the ledge he’s balancing on, in case I push him off. Away from the ache in his soul and the weight in his eyes.
And bonehead that I am, I let him—I let him fuck me into the floor until we’re nothing but heat and sweat, and the way he’s riding me as if he can chase whatever he’s feeling out of his body with pressure and pain.
With the pleasure straining his muscles, his skin glistening in the dim light.
He’s barely breathing.
Just moving.
I take it with a hammer in my pulse and my jaw wired so tight I can’t unclench it. I grab his hips, savage and bruising, like I’m trying to claw my way in.
Skylar’s rhythm falters.
Breaks.
Shadows flicker across his face and for a fleeting moment, I see everything he doesn’t mean to show. I see him , and I wrench my spine from the door, pulling him closer.
But he shakes his head.
He doesn’t want it.
Doesn’t want me , not like that.
He wants the screaming to stay in our bones. Behind our ribs. Rotting in our blood. He needs it, and I’m too weak to tell him no.
Skylar grinds down harder, dragging a throttled grunt from my chest. His dick is a stone column against my abs, sliding on the ridged muscle.
His body tightens, coiling the pressure in my gut tighter.
A shattered gasp escapes him and he comes, spilling between us, breath wrecked, eyes squeezed shut.
He’s so fucking beautiful. That tiny sound, it’s all it takes for the tight heat of him around my dick to send me over the edge.
I come hard , violent heat surging through me, my hips driving up to pump my cum deeper inside him. Savage. Primal. Like I fucking own him. And Skylar…he keeps moving as if he doesn’t know how to stop. As if something’s broken loose inside him and he’s falling over himself to get it back.
Lungs burning, I knock his hand from my mouth and still his hips. I still him , and he shudders as if I’m forcing him back into himself.
He looks down at me with blown, unseeing eyes, hand on my chest—on my thundering heart—body shaking as much as mine, but it feels like more.
Scared as shit, I pull him into a trembling embrace, aware I’ve just lived through something beautiful and terrible. I hold him, trying to catch fragments of rational thought.
There isn’t much.
But while Sol’s warning is already long gone, the dark gaze Jack speared me with before he sent me after Skylar hasn’t faded at all.
It tugs at my senses, invading the sweltering space we’ve carved out for each other, tainting everything that’s right between us like a poisoned slick of fucking wrong .
Tension floods me.
Skylar feels it and eases back, still breathing too hard and too fast, but with more colour in his face than before.
More life , though it comes in the form of a bitter smirk. “Change your mind?”
“About what?”
“About fucking me.”
“No. Never. But I didn’t come after you for that.”
Skylar bares his teeth like a fucking wolf. “Then you shouldn’t have come after me at all.”
His hands are still on my body.
He rips them away and expands the space between us with brutal efficiency, climbing off me and snatching his clothes from the carpet.
He’s dressed before I can blink, and I can’t lie. For all he’s pissed, he looks calmer than when I came up on him. Present, even if the savage stare he’s skewering me with burns more than it has any right to.
I lick my bottom lip, an unconscious tic.
Skylar tracks the movement before he seems to catch himself. He takes another step back and I realise he wants out and I’m blocking his way.
I peel myself from the floor and step aside, bracing myself on the wall as I tuck my fucking dick away. His gaze scorches me. Then it’s just…gone. Like he’s shut himself down.
He rips the door open and disappears into the depths of the flat.
I take a second to temper my pulse, then I follow, and I breach the kitchen doorway as he slams the fridge shut and slings a bag over his shoulder.
He’s leaving. “Where are you going?”
Skylar keeps his back to me. “Work.”
“For how long?”
“Till I’m fucking done.”
He’s in motion again, blowing past me through the living room and towards the front door, and though I know it’s the worst idea in the world, I catch his arm, tugging him back?—
Skylar explodes, using the momentum I’ve given him to come at me fast enough to be in my space before I can blink.
His chest hits mine, barrelling me back a few steps, and I fight every combat instinct I have as his stare cuts as if something inside him is trying to slaughter its way out and leave us both dead.
And that’s a fucking mistake too. Skylar sees me temper my reaction and his face twists, like he hates me for it. “ Stop ,” he spits. “Stop getting in my face and looking at me. I don’t want it. I don’t want you .”
Given he’s just fucked my brains out, his daggered words should raze as deep as him saying I don’t care about Jack. But they don’t—at least, not in the same way. It hurts more to see the gaping fear behind the rage he’s shoving down my throat. To see him drowning in his own skin.
I take a breath, hoping he will too.
He doesn’t. His eyes go hazy, like they were the night I met him, when I thought he was fucking drunk, and I know I’m on borrowed time.
“Skylar.” I bring my hands to his face and hold him there, wrapping my palms around his jaw, knowing I have less than a heartbeat before he pushes me away. “Don’t leave. Not like this.”
“Leave?” He laughs that awful laugh again, barbed and joyless. “Where the fuck would I go? I’m not like you. I don’t get to throw myself into another universe because I’m bored of this shit. This is it for me, and it fucking follows me everywhere.”
It’s the closest he’s ever come to admitting there is an it . But it’s not an opening—a way in to catch him as he fucking falls. He speaks with fatalistic finality and wrenches himself free again.
And this time, I let him go. I have to.
I back up and mould my spine to the wall. He has to pass me to get out, but I can’t do anything about that.
Skylar retrieves the bag that’s slipped to the hardwood floor, his movements stilted with false calm while I still see that wildness humming beneath his skin. The naked pain in his gaze as he looks at me because he has to. To get past. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Look at me like I’m a kicked dog.”
“Sky, I’m not looking at you like anything.”
“Liar. You’re fucking killing me.”
It’s not me that’s killing him. But maybe it’s me who’ll die first.
Skylar moves past me and a breeze filters through the hallway window I left open this morning. It’s all in my fucking head, but I feel like it carries Skylar’s rain and eucalyptus scent more than he does right now, and I close my eyes to it, defeated in the silence he’s leaving behind.
Then he speaks again. One last time. “Whatever this is between us—whatever it was , it’s fucking over. Don’t come near me anymore.”
The words echo in my head, and I wait for the sound of the front door to fell me. I brace for it, that quiet click?—
The door slams.
Brutal.
Loud .
I jump out of my skin, shit that hasn’t happened to me since I was a kid. My heart ricochets, and I turn my head to the door.
It’s broken.
Cracked and hanging from the frame by one hinge. The other is bust and scattered on the floor like the sickest metaphor, and I know what it means. It means I broke him . Because I saw him.
And I don’t know if he’ll ever forgive me.